Construction work in progress

In my blog post of 23 September 2012 entitled Preparing winter wood [display], I said that I intended to stack up the newly-arrived pile of firewood in the usual place, under a corner of the roof in the north-west corner of the house. On second thoughts, I decided to leave most of this wood outside, so that I would have room to start erecting a concrete wall.

As of today, I've almost finished the part of the wall that incorporates reinforced concrete, and moved a small part of the firewood under the roof. I have to prevent surface water from attaining the area where the wood is to be kept, so I've installed an underground drainage system alongside the emerging wall, at the place in the following photo where you see freshly-dug earth.

Meanwhile, the rest of the firewood remains outside, protected from the rain and snow by a big green tarpaulin.

As I said in a recent blog post, I've started to erect a carport outside the north-west corner of the house (which is never reached by the winter sun). That explains the presence in the above photo of new roofing timber, which I brought here in my trailer.

A ramp was created in this area over two years ago.

After those earthworks, this corner of the house was totally bare, as you can see here:

In my blog post of 23 February 2010 entitled North-west corner of my house [display], I presented a project (created by means of Photoshop) for a carport at this place.

Today, the new earth in this area has been well compacted, and it's high time to go ahead with the construction. Here's a photo of the site that I took this morning:

[Click to enlarge]

As you can see, my project mock-up was wrongly-proportioned and rather off-target, since the carport roof in the mock-up was far too low. Here's another view of the site:

Except for the six vertical posts (Douglas-fir wood, treated in a vat in a sawmill at St-Marcellin), and the pale pine rafters at the top (seen lying on the green tarpaulin in an earlier photo), all the rest of the timber comes from an old green-painted wood shed that I built in this area soon after arriving at Gamone.

It was a fine structure, built of sturdy timber, which fitted ideally into the Gamone surroundings.

At that time, I had my first opportunity of getting accustomed to building on sloping ground. The shed was located just alongside the dirt track that used to lead up to a barn on the neighboring property (now replaced by a house). When major roadworks were carried out in order to create a smooth hairpin curve at this spot, I decided to demolish the old shed.

As you can see from the above photo, unless I removed the shed, it would have been impossible to envisage a car ramp leading up to the north-west corner of the house. So, sadly, I decided to knock down my charming construction.

These days, while I'm working on the carport, everything is being held in place by clamps.

Above the northern doorway into the house, a pair of steel brackets (almost a century old) has always intrigued me, and I still have no firm idea of their purpose.

I was able to use one of these mysterious brackets as a firm support to hold the posts in a rigid position up until such time as I insert all the necessary triangular ties to ensure the stability of the structure.

During my work, I'm being constantly observed by a conscientious ever-present foreman.

Exceptionally, the foreman's surveillance was interrupted briefly this morning when he took time off to consume a Kleenex that had dropped out of a pocket of my overalls.

But he's a friendly foreman, who rarely criticizes the quality of my work.

Fitzroy in Sophia's basket

Up until recently, Fitzroy liked to tear apart everything in his vicinity, including cushions, baskets, mats, etc. Well, he seems to have become better behaved at that level. As of yesterday, when I dragged out Sophia's old wicker basket and put a cushion inside, Fitzroy suddenly realized that it might be a comfortable place to lie down, instead of a couple of nice objects to destroy. This afternoon, he even used the basket when I put it alongside his kennel.

I've been trying to prevent him, as far as possible, from venturing around in the paddock with the donkeys, because he comes back to the house covered in prickly burs, which I then have to remove with my fingers in a one-by-one manner. From time to time, in certain underlying regions where the layer of burs is thick, I resort to scissors. As for Fitzroy, he seems to enjoy all this attention, which he probably sees as grooming operations carried out kindly by the chief dog in the pack (that is, me).

THIS MORNING: Yesterday was quite cool. In the space of a week, we've gone from heat-wave conditions to chilly autumn weather. Last night, seeing Fitzroy dozing cozily, indeed angelically, in Sophia's basket on the warm kitchen floor, I didn't feel like putting him outside into his kennel. So, I closed the door between the kitchen and the living room (so that Fitzroy wouldn't decide to scramble upstairs and wake me up in the early hours of the morning), and left him to sleep there. Well, this morning, I discovered that it was no more than wishful thinking when I spoke about Fitzroy being better behaved in his relationship with easily-destructible objects. Back at the time of Sophia, Fitzroy had already started to destroy the basket and its cushions (which once belonged to an Ikea chair, which has had new cushions for a year now). This morning, inside and around the basket, there was a new crop of fragments of foam rubber. For this outside photo, I gathered up the fragments and placed them inside the aging basket.

My dear old Sophia is no longer there to deplore the damaged state of her cherished basket, which was impeccable before Fitzroy's arrival. So, it doesn't really matter if Fitzroy and the elements continue their inevitable process of destruction. And I'll continue to collect the bits and pieces of a morning.

Hot dog

In our corner of France, this afternoon, it was exceptionally hot. Personally, the heat doesn't affect me greatly, but I nevertheless stay inside the house, where the temperature is cool. On the other hand, I noticed that Fitzroy was trying to escape from the heat, first by burrowing down into his favorite dust bowl alongside the house, and then by moving to a far corner of the cellar. So, I decided to set him up comfortably on a cushion beneath an electric fan.

He slept in that position for an hour or so (which suggests that he probably hadn't slept well during the previous hot night). Later on in the afternoon, I invited him to go out for a walk, but no sooner had I opened the door than we were hit by a gust of hot air. So we rushed back into the house again.

It's evening now, and everything has returned to normal. Fitzroy is dozing at my feet, beneath the computer.

There are journalists who claim that France might indeed be tasting, for the very first time, the effects of global warming... but no scientific statement has yet been made in this sense. On the other hand, there appears to be an intense nationwide effort by health services aimed at ensuring that seniors don't get knocked out by the heat. When I witness all this agitation here in France—for a few days with temperatures in the zone of 38 to 40 degrees—I often wonder retrospectively how this kind of problem was solved in my native Australia. Maybe it simply wasn't... Would anybody in our state government have bothered to look at the statistics of mortality in periods of extreme heat, to see whether the victims included an unusually large proportion of old people? Are statistics of this kind actually established today in Australia?

My dog is an esthete

There's no doubt that Fitzroy is a superior dog... quite apart from the trivial observation that he seems to have accepted me as his master.

Click to enlarge, then hit ESCAPE to return to the blog

His tail may be a bundle of prickly burrs, but Fitzroy's heart is soft and sweet, and his mind is as pure as icy water in the torrents of Risoul in the Hautes-Alpes département, up where he was born on 10 July 2010. He is lovable and constantly (urgently) in need of caresses. And furthermore, he has taste. Artistic taste. In a nutshell, Fitzroy is an esthete. Indeed, a connoisseur.

Fitzroy's specialty is driftwood. Now, this might sound funny in the case of a dog (and his master) who are settled in the mountains, hundreds of kilometers away from the seashore. But bits of wood don't need an ocean to drift. Just ask Fitzroy. He would tell you that beautiful bits of wood can drift on mountain streams, on ice and snow, maybe even (who knows?) in the air. In any case, telling us mountain-dwellers that we don't have driftwood would be like telling our new president François Hollande that he doesn't have Nicolas Sarkozy. Like, it's everywhere, ubiquitous. But Fitzroy selects only the finest specimens.

My dog would surely refer to such items as nocturnal objects, reflecting the fact that he collects them in the early hours of the morning, just before the sun rises. Like fairies gathering dewdrops. Every object collected by Fitzroy has a story, which only my dog could tell. Each story elucidates the context in which that object acquired its form, its colors, its character, or—as Fitzroy might say (I try to avoid putting words into his mouth)—its soul.

In the case of my dear departed Sophia, I always apprehended the day when she would suddenly shun food, for I knew that this repulsion would announce her end... as it did. Concerning Fitzroy, I would certainly be gravely worried about his state of health (both bodily and mental) if ever he dragged home an ugly item, devoid of magic charm, such as a hunk of plywood or plastic.

Seriously, the idea that my canine companion Fitzroy seems to express esthetic judgment is, to my mind, quite fabulous. It would be interesting to see how distinguished evolutionary biologists such as Richard Dawkins and P Z Myers might evaluate and possibly explain my claim. In a nutshell (forgive me my constant usage of this metaphor, due to my preoccupations as a walnut farmer):

What might have been the evolutionary advantage
of being a driftwood esthete?

You can lead a dog to water...

... but you can't necessarily make him dive in and swim. The presence of Emmanuelle at Gamone made it feasible to coax Fitzroy into the car and take him down to the Bourne in the village of Choranche. During the excursion, my daughter's role consisted of making sure that our dog wouldn't jump up onto me when I was at the wheel.

If Fitzroy's head appears to be a little wet, that simply means that I had cupped up water in my hands and annointed him. For the moment, in spite of French successes at the Olympic Games, Fitzroy seems to be quite uninterested in swimming. We must not forget that he's a mountain dog, born in the Alpine village of Risoul 1850, at an altitude (as its name indicates) of 1850 meters. Fitzroy is capable of scaling an almost vertical embankment in a few bounds, but he's apparently uninterested in the idea of jumping into a stream in the valley.

Howling

Fitzroy doesn't usually make a lot of noise. When he's playing with Moshé and Fanette, he barks a lot in the hope of impressing the donkeys. Then he's no doubt dismayed to discover that his barking doesn't impress them at all. So, whenever he wants to startle the donkeys, Fitzroy adopts the surprise-arrival technique, which consists of creeping up on the drowsy animals, suddenly appearing from nowhere and leaping in front of them... which usually creates the desired effects. In general, whenever Fitzroy is confronted with any kind of unfamiliar phenomenon, he tends to sink onto his belly so that he can study the situation calmly at ground level. During this kind of observation phase (which Fitzroy even applies to me when I return to Gamone after a shopping excursion), the dog remains perfectly motionless. Then, when he has successfully analyzed the situation, he promptly wags his tail, while still laying flat on the ground, indicating that the meditation operations are terminated.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that, besides his normal barking, Fitzroy is capable of producing a quite fabulous sound. He can howl like a wolf! But he only does this in special circumstances, when he has encountered an exceptional situation... such as the presence of roe deer, for example, on the slopes opposite the house. When he starts to howl, Fitzroy throws his head back, stretches his neck and seems to be gazing at the heavens. As for sound itself, it's blood-curdling (as they say in the classics), but particularly fascinating when you have the privilege of being just alongside the howling beast. Well, yesterday, finding that Fitzroy was emitting a halfhearted howl (I forget why), I decided to see if I could encourage him. So, I did my best to imitate Fitzroy imitating a wolf. Miracle, it worked. Fitzroy was thrilled to find his master howling like an aging wolf with laryngitis, and he promptly howled back at me. Every time I croaked out a feeble howl, Fitzroy responded like an opera star. But he soon lost interest in the game.

Today, I succeeded twice in getting him started again. Tomorrow I'll get together some kind of reward system, such as chunks of cheese. Maybe there's a future for us on the stage of a Riviera cabaret, or on TV. But the situation can be embarrassing whenever Fitzroy has decided that enough is enough. If a visitor were to drop in at Gamone at such a moment, and find me howling ridiculously in front of a silent dog, I might have some psychiatric questions to answer.

Jungle excursion

On the slopes just above my house, the gully where Gamone Creek flows (when there's rain) is, at present, a dark and humid jungle. And that's where Sophia has always gone to do her business. Yesterday morning, I took this photo of her as she was emerging.

[Click to enlarge]

Fitzroy joined me, and we waited for Sophia to wander back up onto the road.

Instead of that, Sophia suddenly decided to stroll resolutely into the depths of the jungle, into a zone that is too steep for me to explore. It was only an hour or so later that she reemerged calmly, down at the corner where the road crosses over the creek. You can imagine that, during that hour, I had visions of my dog having wandered off into oblivion, to a place that I would never locate, meaning that I would never find traces of her. Worse than there, Gamone Creek was running violently in a series of cascades, and I feared that Sophia could get drowned. When she suddenly reappeared, and I led her back up to the house, I was like a disciple on the road to Emmaus.

I rewarded Sophia by subjecting her to a warm bath and a shampoo, to get rid of the muck that has been accumulating on her fur since she entered her disturbing state of food aversion... which continues, unfortunately. All I can say for the moment (as I know that many friends are concerned by her condition) is that Sophia spends most of her time sleeping on the warm kitchen floor, and that she does not appear to be unduly distressed. But she's living dangerously...

Sophia's stayin' alive

Over the last week, Sophia has been avoiding all meat-based food including, above all, her customary croquettes. She's surviving on raw eggs, fragments of apple and bits of bread.

Last Friday, I described this situation to the veterinarian, who said that my dog's self-imposed diet was indeed unorthodox, but by no means catastrophic.

These days, since the weather has been warm and dry, I've been encouraging Sophia to spend her nights out on the lawn with Fitzroy, instead of on the kitchen floor (her customary bedroom). If she has an urgent need to urinate or defecate, being outside is convenient (rather than barking to wake me up in the middle of the night, to let her out). Well, when I got up yesterday morning, I was surprised to find that Sophia, for the first time ever, had apparently spent the night as a squatter in Fitzroy's kennel.

This unusual behavior alarmed me in that I couldn't help wondering whether Sophia was maybe searching instinctively for a place in which she might doze off into eternal sleep. Twenty minutes later, she emerged from the kennel, did her business up alongside her familiar track, and promptly took off in the wrong direction, sliding down the grassy slopes through the weeds, and ending up in a spot that was too steep for me to access. She continued her descent, guided by Fitzroy, until she reached the road. Then she decided that it would be a good idea to quench her thirst in the creek and to take a bath in a waterhole. I had to go out of my way to persuade her to stroll back up to the house.

Back home, Sophia chose to take a nap in another unusual setting: on a mound of rocky earth at the far end of the ancient cellar behind the house. Normally, she only goes there on exceptionally hot days... which was not the case yesterday. Later on, she decided to spend some time in the most unusual spot of all: a narrow tunnel dug into the hill behind the house, which I've always imagined as an ancient hiding-place back in the days when the prosperous vineyards of Choranche were often attacked by Protestant bandits. When Sophia emerged from the tunnel, I began to wonder whether my dear dog might be the victim of a sudden onslaught of senility. To rule out the possibility that she might wander off down the road in the early hours of the morning, I decided that it would be wise to attach her to Fitzroy's chain alongside the kennel. Meanwhile, I boarded up the entry to the tunnel.

Yesterday evening, I was so enthralled by a TV show that I didn't even realize that it was raining heavily. When I went outside, around midnight, Sophia had left the kennel and was lying down in the wet grass, totally soaked. I rushed the two dogs into the kitchen, put Sophia onto a cotton sheet to dry her out, and turned on the heating. There was a marvelous moment of complicity as Fitzroy started to lick Sophia's wet fur.

This morning, everything seems to have returned to normal... and Fitzroy is still watching over his old aunt. If the two animals appear to be wet, it's because they had just spent 20 minutes on the slopes, in the rain, while Sophia went about her business. With the rain and mud outside, and all the coming and going, the kitchen floor is like a pigpen... but I can't be worried about that. My only aim, in the immediate future, is to take care of Sophia as best I can.

Once again, Sophia downed three raw eggs for breakfast. I remain worried, of course, by the fact that she's unenthusiastic about any other food. Still I'm relieved that she never whimpers, and does not seem to be in pain. Curiously, her nose hasn't been running at all since yesterday... which might (or might not) be a positive sign.

Dogs and stars

For the last two days, my memories have been dominated by images of Christine's dear dog Gamone. In the stark clarity of the death of a dog, I find a distilled paradigm of the tragic brevity of our human existence. I am shocked by the abrupt flight into nothingness of the simple beauty and nobility of the departed animal. It is a theme of immense melancholy, of celestial emptiness. And yet the cosmic messages of a dog's existence are no less real than those that emanate from us humans. Their existential photons end up hurtling towards the stars, just like ours. We're all on the same wavelength, as it were.

Sophia pursues her calm existence, apparently oblivious of the fact that her daughter Gamone has now been totally metamorphosed into a burst of something heading out towards the confines of the Cosmos. As you can see from this photo, Sophia looks quite slim and alert. In fact, in spite of her advanced age, she's in good shape. As for Fitzroy, he remains relatively earthbound for the moment, in the sense that he is capable of meditating deeply, for long periods of time, on the mysteries of a jet of water emerging from a hose.

But a canine philosopher is capable of interrupting his cogitations, maybe in the twilight zone of a warm spring evening, to go out hunting. The following morning, I admire the catch:

That's the first time I've ever seen a gray rat in the vicinity of the house. It's reassuring to know that Fitzroy can apparently find and destroy such a pest.

Mondo cane

Sophia's primary wish, as she grows older, is to lead a peaceful and lazy (non-strenuous) existence... like all of us, you might say.

Whenever I happen to wander up the road on my own, to fetch water for the donkeys, Sophia gets upset and starts to bark. She wants to keep me in sight all the time (except, of course, if I go out in the car, which doesn't seem to bother her).

In the turd domain, Queen Sophia has become a little like the French "Sun King" Louis XIV at Versailles, who apparently had the habit of sitting on the royal chamber pot every morning, and doing his business, in the company of selected members of his court. My dog Sophia expects Fitzroy and me to accompany her to a precise place on the slopes, 50 meters beyond the house, and to wait there until not the least fragment of a turd remains to be ejected from her anal tract. I'm always amused by the way in which Sophia, up until the latter question has received a definitive answer, continues to beat around the bush, coming and going, hesitating, and turning in circles. It's clearly a fundamental matter of making a good decision.

Fitzroy now accepts the principle of being chained up for certain periods during the day (in the middle of the morning or afternoon, for example, after having eaten), to remove the temptation of setting out on exploratory expeditions along the roads, no doubt in pursuit of magic female odors. He doesn't seem to be traumatized by this necessity, as he comes readily when I call him to be attached to the chain.

During the night, he's totally free to do as he pleases. And one of the activities that pleases Fitzroy immensely is the destruction of colored plastic objects.

It goes without saying that I'm not happy to see the nozzle of a hose subjected to this treatment. But how can I possibly explain to my dog that I need those plastic objects for several good reasons? Just imagine if a grass fire broke out, and I suddenly found my hose nozzle in that state. Fitzroy, of course, would never worry about such things as grass fires. On the other hand, he has always been infatuated by water hoses.

We humans see the Large Hadron Collider and its beams of particles, beneath the Franco-Swiss border, as an extraordinary tool capable of maybe providing answers to some of the basic mysteries of our existence. Fitzroy seems to see the jet of water emerging from a hose with a similar degree of awe. Even if it means getting soaked for the nth time, Fitzroy would like to break through this mystery, and get to the bottom (or maybe rather the top) of it all.

My dog performs astonishing jumps of well over a meter into the air. I tried to manipulate the hose and take photos of Fitzroy's spectacular jumps at the same time, but my images cannot possibly hope to convey the intellectual rage of my dear dog.

A jet of water emerging from a hose looks like a tangible thing... and yet it seems to evaporate into thin wet air as soon as you attempt to grasp it. Maybe it's a matter of adjusting one's angle of attack, even in mid-air.

Fitzroy's determination to solve this problem knows no bounds... apart from his own, which are truly superb.

I would never dare attempt to explain to my dog the curious physical nature of liquids, because he has clearly discovered these mysteries all on his own. I prefer to leave Fitzroy with his permanent determination to catch the Snark one of these days. Others might wait for Godot. Meanwhile, Fitzroy jumps.

Donkey fur, donkey thoughts

The state of the donkeys' fur is like a natural barometer indicating that winter is not far away.

In the following photo, Moshé's ears are pointing back down towards Fitzroy, sensing the dog's movements, and the donkey seems to be saying to himself: "If that bloody dog tries to bite my hind legs one more time, I'll screw him."

Maybe Fitzroy sensed that Moshé might even be getting ready to transform his thoughts into action.

In any case, the dog reckoned it was no longer a good idea to hang around in the vicinity of the donkey.

Frequent view of Fitzroy

Several times a day, this is the view I have of Fitzroy:

That's to say, he's settled on the floor beneath a corner of my desk, and staring up at me while I work at my computer. From time to time, he gets tired of holding his head up, and he dozes for a quarter of an hour. When he's really bored, and wants to get out of the house, Fitzroy has developed an excellent technique aimed at letting me know that it's time to interrupt my use of the computer. As soon as I reach towards my mouse, Fitzroy simply raises his snout ever so slightly and bumps my wrist aside. When this happens, it becomes impossible to carry on using the computer, so I have to get up and bundle my dog down the stairs and out through the kitchen door.

Fitzroy has an even more eloquent way of letting me know that a break is necessary. He simply scrambles up onto my knees and places his head between me and the Macintosh. Clearly, there are limits to Fitzroy's patience with computing.

Fitzroy has a new ball

Late yesterday afternoon, in the semi-darkness, I came upon an elegant soft black-and-white leather ball in the middle of an almost-empty parking zone at the supermarket in St-Jean-en-Royans. It had no doubt fallen out of a car. So, I brought it back home and gave it to Fitzroy.

It's just the right size for Fitzroy: that's to say, a little too big for him to get his teeth into it firmly, destructively. So, the ball might survive.

Autumn dogs

The weather at Gamone has been mild, and the dogs have been lounging around lazily in the sun.

They get on wonderfully well together. This afternoon, a local hunter, Daniel Berger, strolled past the house, with one of his hounds on a leash. When I went out to say hello to him, my dogs accompanied me. Suddenly, Fitzroy decided that he didn't like the look of the poor docile hound, so he sprang on him. The surprise attack wasn't particularly vicious, and only lasted for half a second. I was amused in that it was the first time ever that I've seen Fitzroy lose his temper.

Fitzroy excavator

This photo, taken this morning on the road just up from my house at Gamone, shows Fitzroy posing proudly in front of a hole that he had dug in the embankment some 24 hours earlier.

[Click to enlarge]

Yesterday, I happened to be located some 20 meters further up the road (but without my Nikon) at the instant when Fitzroy decided to carry out this excavation. I was strolling up the road when I heard a kind of dull rumbling sound behind me. Turning around, I was amazed to see Fitzroy in full action, engulfed in a cloud of dust. His robust front paws were rotating rapidly, gouging out earth and stones that flew over his head. This was the first time I had ever caught Fitzroy in an act of excavation. (Normally he works alone, stealthily, in the early hours of the morning.) The entire operation lasted less than 20 seconds, as if a powerful machine had been set in operation, and then turned off.

What in fact was the purpose of this unexpected excavation? Like any self-respecting fossicker, Fitzroy refrains from revealing details. In the case of potential seams of precious metals or gems, you don't go around town shouting out about what you're doing. You simply shut up, keep quiet about your findings, and continue to dig. I suspect, though, that my marvelous friend Fitzroy might have sighted a tiny lizard.

Working alone

At Gamone, every outside task that I'm called upon to perform must be done on my own. For example, I decided to move this old roof beam, which had been an acceptable rustic bench, up until it started to rot.

[Click to enlarge slightly]

If there were somebody here to help me, we would have picked up this rafter and carried it a few dozen meters to the place where I wanted to discard it. On my own, though, I had to be more imaginative. So, I used a pair of rollers, which made the task simple and effortless.

This is the spirit of my American hero Henry David Thoreau in his humble cabin (constructed by himself) in the woods of Massachusetts, alongside the lake Walden, whom I've already mentioned in this blog [display]. But don't get me wrong. I don't advocate living on one's own and being obliged to invent creative solutions to daily down-to-earth problems as an ideal lifestyle.

In the photo, notice the presence of an admirer of my ingeniousness.

Dog loves books

I like to be surrounded by all kinds of books, so that I can pick them up at random whenever I feel like reading something different. And I've always found that one of the most convenient places to store the books that surround me is on the bedroom floor. Well, my dog Fitzroy seems to share my tastes at this level.

Sophia's joints have become a little too old for climbing up the stairs to my bedroom, but Fitzroy seems to like this place, and he dashes up here whenever the doors are open. He's capable of taking a nap there in the middle of my books, without ever bumping into any of them. But, after a while, he feels that it's time for action. So, he'll suddenly jump up onto my knees, occupying all the available space between me and my computer. When this happens, my only solution is to lead him downstairs, where he's happy to romp around with Sophia on the lawn in front of the house. Then I close the doors, and get back up to my computer.

Fitzroy socializing

I don't have any photos, because it all happened unexpectedly. Towards the end of Monday afternoon, my new Gamone neighbors phoned to inform me that they were about to throw a house-warming party, and that I was invited. Realizing that I had less than an hour to get shaved, showered and spruced up for a social evening (local etiquette), I darted away to St-Jean-en-Royans to purchase a couple of bottles of wine. Returning to Gamone at about 7 o'clock, I had a single thought in mind: lock up Fitzroy in the kitchen, along with Sophia, so that the dogs wouldn't follow me up to my neighbors' party. But Fitzroy was nowhere in sight. So, I set off on foot, with my bottles of wine. On the way up to the lovely new home of Jackie and Marie, Fitzroy was there to greet me. He had already sensed that a party was underway, and he got up there early, without waiting to be invited along by me or anybody else.

Well, to cut a long story short, it was a wonderful evening, both for Fitzroy and for me. My dog was socially faultless. And he even had an opportunity (a must for every French dog) of tasting bones of frogs' legs. I drank glass after glass of rosé wine, and talked on with guests from Louisiana. The former owner, my friend Bob, was present, along with his companion Kiki. Towards the end of this marvelous evening, we all sat around a log fire, looking out over the Cournouze. Then I strolled back home with Fitzroy… who had behaved excellently, won many friends, and succeeded brilliantly in his social coming-out.

Asleep in the kitchen, Sophia was totally unimpressed, indeed uninterested, by our descriptions of this splendid evening of frogs' legs, rosé wine and a log fire. It's a fact: Sophia has never been a socialite.

Comfortable dog bed beneath the foliage

Inside the house, whenever Sophia leaves her big wicker basket empty, Fitzroy has the habit of hopping into it, and often falling asleep. Fortunately, Sophia seems to find it perfectly normal that her basket should be borrowed, from time to time, in this way. As I've often said, she's imbued with a profound Christian spirit of charity. Outside, Fitzroy has always had a fine kennel, but he prefers to sleep out in the open, on a thick wad of straw in front of the wall of the house. This afternoon, for the first time ever, I was amused to discover that Sophia had borrowed Fitzroy's bed for a short nap.

It certainly looks like an attractive place to rest on a summer afternoon. The straw is surrounded by lavender, in full bloom. The shrub on the right is a white-flowering wisteria, whose foliage is sufficiently thick, at this time of the year, to act as a canopy capable of protecting the dog from rain. The plant on the left is a wild dog rose (Rosa canina, called églantier in French), which produces pale pink flowers.

I was wondering why the name of this wild rose (apparently the ancestor of cultivated roses) evokes dogs. In ancient times, people believed that the root of this plant could cure a person who had contracted rabies, after being bitten by an afflicted dog. I'm always amazed when I hear tales like that. I try to imagine the scenario: A gravely sick individual, on a stretcher, is carted along to an apothecary who—for reasons that are hard to fathom—gives the patient a concoction containing the ground-up roots of a wild rose bush. How and why did apothecaries decide that such a preparation might play a positive role in healing such a serious affliction as rabies? More to the point: Did the concoction actually produce positive results?

Maybe, an ancient apothecary happened to notice, like me, that his dogs liked to lie around outside on a bed of straw surrounded by lavender, in the shade of Wisteria and wild rose bushes. So, when one of his dogs went mad and bit people, the apothecary might have asked himself: "Before that animal went mad, what were the plants and flowers associated with its normal state of harmonious well-being?" And maybe the apothecary imagined that these same plants and flowers might play a role in restoring the health of victims of rabies.

Circus of Choranche, Bastille Day

One of my greatest pleasures consists of simply gazing out over the circus of Choranche from a first-floor window of my house at Gamone. Whenever I detect some special magic in the view, I take a photo. This one, for example, is a Bastille Day symphony of clouds rising over the eastern horizon:

This morning, down in front of the house, Fitzroy detected the presence of an alien visitor:

The blue balloon and its attached card had been sent into the air by a girl named Clémence, on the eve of Bastille Day, from an agricultural village up near Lyon. I mailed the card back to her, as requested, so that her village would have a record of this flight of one of its balloons. I imagined myself as Neil Armstrong on 20 July 1969, radioing back to Earth: "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed."